The Nightingale Shore Murder (13 page)

In relation to the doctor, the Superintendent's chief duty was to see that he had capable nurses – to encourage him to accept that one nurse was as capable as another, to avoid constantly reorganising the day's work to give him his favourite nurse. For the public, she was to spread knowledge of the work, its methods and aims, to encourage support, and to discourage calls on the charity's resources from those who could afford to pay for their own care. For the Committee of the Association, the Superintendent's responsibility was to ‘
keep the books, reports and accounts in such perfect order that any information required by them is instantly procurable.
' Perhaps it was watching Mabel juggling all these different responsibilities over many years that made Florence express reluctance to take on ‘management' herself, and to successfully avoid promotion for many years.

The work of the Sunderland DNA – nursing, teaching, raising funds, assisting the doctors – continued to expand under Mabel's and Florence's leadership. In 1905, the Queen's Nurses' magazine reported that
‘Sunderland has made a great advance owing to the intense interest by the workmen in the work of the Association
.' Twenty seven local factories were regular subscribers, and had formed a committee of representatives from which they elected four members to the executive committee of the Association. The following year, it was reported that more than 30 local works were subscribing regularly to the Association, and were represented on the Executive Committee: ‘
The income amounts to £769 odd, and of this £470 is contributed by the workmen. Additional premises have been bought for the purpose of enlarging the Nurses' Home.'

By 1911, there were seven nurses working alongside Mabel and Florence, though all of the 1901 staff had moved on. The new nurses were Alexina Angus and Isabel Mackinson from Scotland; Edith McKinson, Constance Eales and Margaret Layfield who were more local, from Northumberland and Durham; and two Staffordshire women, Louisa Walker and Ellen Evans – all looked after by a cook and a housemaid. Meanwhile, Mabel's influence also extended well beyond Sunderland: she was a member of the executive committee of the Association of Queen's Superintendents of the Northern Counties from 1901 to 1913. She travelled to meetings in the major cities across the north of England, and sometimes to London for joint meetings with the Association for Queen's Superintendents in the Metropolitan and Southern Counties. In 1910, she presented a paper to the Conference of Northern Superintendents on ‘The examination for the Queen's Roll, its advantages and disadvantages.' Amongst the latter, she noted the timeless issues that a written exam can never test practical work, common sense, tact or resourcefulness in an emergency; it may procure promotion for a nurse who can write a good paper but who may in other ways be less suitable; and it deters older and more experienced nurses, who have taken exams in the past and don't want to take any more.

Mabel also attended the Jubilee Congress of District Nursing, held in Liverpool from 12-14 May 1909, to celebrate 50 years of district nursing. Amy Hughes, the General Superintendent of the Queen Victoria Jubilee Institute at the time, reported to the Congress that there were now more than 3,500 names on the Roll of Queen's Nurses. William Rathbone's ‘successful experiment' had spread rapidly across Britain and abroad: as well as Wales, Scotland and Ireland, there were representatives at the Congress from nursing associations in Canada, the United States, France, Norway, Sweden, Holland, Denmark, Australia, Bermuda, Switzerland and Africa. The Italian National Council of Women and the Bulgaria Red Cross Society both sent delegates to the Congress to learn more about this organised system of nursing in the home.

And it was not just the idea that travelled. Queen's Nurses themselves were taking advantage of their professional status to travel abroad in a way that most unmarried women of modest means would rarely manage. They wrote letters and articles to the Queen's Nurses' magazine describing their travels and their experiences of nursing in Jerusalem, Malta, Italy, The Bermudas, the Balkans and South Africa. Letters from Queen's Nurses in Labrador, Canada, came via dog mail across the ice floes until the worst of the freezing conditions cut the communities off until the Spring.

The proud Lord Mayor of Liverpool was pleased to promote his City's part in this astonishing expansion and development of a whole new part of the nursing profession, and of the Institute which led it. He announced at the Jubilee Congress that:

The audience, according to the official record, responded ‘Hear, hear.'

While Florence and Mabel were helping to celebrate district nursing's Jubilee, and Queen's Nurses were making themselves indispensible all over the country, the first decade of the new century also brought major advances in medicine, and new discoveries in the sciences. The Queen Victoria Jubilee Institute was quick to incorporate these advances into its training, and to encourage its nurses to learn about them. The Institute arranged a lecture for all Queen's Nurses in London, in February 1913, on the subject of ‘How living germs attack and defend us in Nature' illustrated, according to a report in the Queen's Nurses' magazine, ‘
by a series of excellent cinematograph pictures
.' The article records the wonder and excitement of the nursing audience at the presentation:

In spite of the fact that some of the Queen's Nurses present could have been, like Florence and Mabel, veterans of the Boer War, and all of them dealt daily with the messy realities of illness and injury in the poorest of homes, the organisers felt that the lecture could not end there:

As the twentieth century entered its second decade, the Queen's Nurses out and about in Britain's towns and villages were no doubt well aware that their skills and expertise were in demand, at home and abroad. And they were filled with the confidence instilled by their Institute that they were the best trained nurses of their day. They could not have known that the two biggest tests of the resilience of district nursing, and of the nurses themselves, were now imminent: the first World War and the global flu pandemic.

For Florence, the years around the turn of the decade had brought a series of bereavements. In 1895, her great-uncle, the Reverend George Brewin, who had been an enduring presence in the lives of both Shore sisters, died at the age of 75. Her uncle Harrington Shore, who had been her father's partner in the family's financial disaster thirty years before, died in 1908. And in 1910, her famous godmother Florence Nightingale died at her South Street home in London, after many years of illness. Florence had idolised the nursing icon, writing to her and visiting her regularly.

Florence Nightingale's death was met with an outpouring of grief and appreciation from the public, even though she had not been active in public for more than a decade. Her contribution was summed up in a comment from Harriet Martineau which was quoted in the editorial of Nursing Notes in September 1910: ‘
She effected two great things, a mighty reform in the care of the sick and an opening for her sex into the region of serious business.
'

The same issue of Nursing Notes reprinted a poem about Florence Nightingale's death from the 16
^th
August edition of the Evening News, which ran:

The poem's author is identified only by their initials at the end of the piece. The initials are ‘F.S.', raising the interesting idea that, unless it is just a coincidence, Florence Shore herself might have written it.

Florence Nightingale left an estate worth just over £35,600 after taxes, and a very long and detailed Will with three codicils, setting out the disposal of her possessions, including her many books and papers. She made no fewer than seventeen separate monetary gifts to relatives, or the children of relatives; and sixteen monetary gifts to nurses and other colleagues from her professional life. These included the Secretary of the Army Sanitary Commission, the Reverend Mother of the Hospital Sisters in Great Ormond Street, the Matron of Paddington Infirmary, and Florence Shore's old Superintendent at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, Miss Spencer. Seven servants received sums of money or gifts, amongst them Elizabeth Wiggins, who received £20 and Miss Nightingale's cats, and her maid Ellen Tugby, who, if still in her service, received £205 and her parrot ‘
with my best thanks for her loving service
.'

‘Two little godchildren', out of a number of such relatives, some formal and some informal, are mentioned in the Will: Ruth Verney and Kathleen Verney both received books. Florence Shore is not mentioned in her godmother's Will.

A year later, in 1911, Florence's father, Offley Bohun Shore, died at St Faith's private nursing home in Ealing, West London. He was suffering from heart disease and died of ‘mitral regurgitation and infarct of the lung'. At 72, he had outlived his second wife, Annie, though she had been 28 years his junior. And in spite of the turmoil that Offley had caused in the family's life, Florence had kept in touch with him while he was in St Faith's at the end of his long life, organising nursing care for him.

Florence's 70 year old mother, Anna Maria, died at Whickham Lodge in Dawlish in Devon the following year. Coincidentally, she died on the same date that her daughter would die of her injuries eight years later: 16th January. Anna had been living in Devon with her second husband, Joseph Henry Laye, now retired from his army career with the rank of Major General. Anna left all of her estate – only £680 net – to Joseph Laye, her ‘beloved husband'.

A happier event in the Shore family had also taken place in the early years of the century. Offley Bohun Fairless Stovin Shore, Florence's brother, had fallen in love at the age of 45. He was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Indian Army, and had been posted to Canada on a two year secondment to advise the Government there on its army, because his health was not good enough to allow a return to India for some time. He sailed to New York in December 1906, with letters of introduction to the Sinnickson family of Philadelphia from mutual friends in England. He fell in love with Caroline Perry Sinnickson, the eldest daughter of the family, and they were married in 1908 in Philadelphia.

Most of Offley's family welcomed the new addition: his father and Caroline grew close and exchanged affectionate letters. On their arrival in England, just weeks after the wedding, they were met at Southampton by letters from Offley's father, his Aunt Caroline Stovin, and from Florence and Urith. Offley Shore senior travelled to London to meet the newly-weds at Paddington Station, and Caroline Stovin arranged a lunch the next day at her house in Connaught Square so that Offley's wife could meet the family. Offley senior and his brother Harrington Shore were there; and Florence travelled down specially from Sunderland to meet her new sister-in-law. The new bride described the reception in a letter to her uncle:

Offley's mother Anna Maria, however, was not amongst the party. She had made it clear in letters to Caroline that she did not approve of the match. According to a letter from one her friends, who eventually helped to reconcile her to the match, she had hoped for a royal marriage, or at least marriage to a Duke's daughter, for her son. ‘
She is delightful'
, the friend wrote to Caroline of her mother-in-law, ‘
but very autocratic and high tempered – but adores Offley to madness
.' The ‘Spartan Mother' Offley had described years before was still disappointing her son. He and Caroline remained estranged for five years because of her refusal to accept his choice of wife.

Yet it was a loving and successful marriage, documented in hundreds of letters between them, and to family members, throughout Offley's army service back in India and in Russia, and later in the first World War. When Offley had an operation in India in 1909, and Caroline went to visit him, she wrote that ‘
I was allowed to go to him and found him just coming out of ether – not ill – but a little vague and big tears rolling down his cheeks which he told me afterwards were because he could not remember where I was.'

Offley's letters also repeatedly show his devotion, affection and admiration for his wife. In one, he recounts to his father-in-law how his wife dealt with the formidable Lord Kitchener:

Caroline's letters to her family record her growing acquaintance with the Shore family over the years, and her relationship with her sisters-in-law, Florence and Urith. In 1909, when they were preparing to leave England for India again, Caroline wrote that they had given up the idea of taking a maid with them, but had invited Urith to go with them as their guest (though at her own travelling expense) for six months. Urith did not take up the invitation, but relations were still cordial, and Florence and Urith were both in the party that saw Caroline off to be presented at Court in February.

While Offley and Caroline were away in India, Florence wrote regularly to Caroline, keeping her informed about old Offley Shore's health. Offley was also still writing to his son in India, sometimes dictating his letters to his nurse. Caroline wrote that her husband was ‘
so saddened by the sufferings of his ‘devoted companion and best friend' as he calls his Father from whom, with the sad vicissitudes in their lives, he has been so much separated.'
Offley Shore's final letter to his son, which arrived in India after news of his death had been cabled, is testimony to the warmth of their relationship. After congratulating his son on his promotion to Full Colonel, and some comments about the political situation regarding India, Offley finishes his letter:

He signs the letter ‘
The very attached old Gov.'

Caroline wrote after old Offley's death that her husband loved his father deeply, and that

After their parents' deaths, Offley and his sisters met occasionally in England as they sorted out the estates. Florence and Offley visited the two nurses who had tended their father during his last years of illness, and visited their father's grave. Offley went to see his Edinburgh lawyers about his and his sisters' inheritance – while Caroline complained in her letters about the death duties to be paid. Florence wrote to Caroline's Aunt Fanny in America to introduce herself, and added: